9/28/2006

whenever you have friends drive you to the bank, you should say, "leave it running"

these are notes from the margins of complex variables:"there will still be a gap between what is and what ought to be" - Clintoneverything = nothingalways remember that the difference between you and me is very very small.never, EVER assume that you understand what i am saying. you probably shouldnt even assume that i know what i am saying.i like to round up, so i truncate accordingly.i know a lot, but i am a very slow thinker. i compensate by thinking all the time.socks and coathangers on their own appear to lack conservation laws. however, perhaps together their sum is conserved.faulty hair folicalways to get A's – cold hard cashinformation literacy.it seems that the large majority of human progress has been an organizing, communicating, specifying, and reorganizing of our collection of knowledge.a very useful attricbute to teach a child would be enjoying the process of reading.build a homopolar motor in physics!"thats why god invented calculators" - Dickk is for counterk is for kounter?dump truck function.

i have a fear of appearing too attached. and also a fear appearing too distant. i feel confident that i somehow come across as both. she really liked me last week. maybe she'll like me again next week. my head causes more trouble than it is worth, not quite. off with his head!

when you are alive, i am caught up in knots, and i miss everything important. but that makes me want to be alive too, except i am too well netted; too scrambled, two overeasy. i put all my eggs in one basket after taking out an unreasonably large insurance policy on said eggs. but dont fret, im not counting on you to break them. (i bet i say that to all the girls).

9/27/2006

im trying to do my part to end the hospitable environment earth currently offers."youre not supposed to count your chickens before they come out of the eggs."

a completely powerful will would be a mysterious thing. for instance, i have much self control, however i cannot change my beliefs at will. they are beliefs due to something deeper, it would seem something based on reason. but an all-powerful will would have the ability to abandon and alter beliefs at whim.

i am superficially deep. you are your own enemy and you dont even know it. calm down im gonna hold your hand.

"ive never seen so many dead hookers in all my life!-lord knows i have..."

you dont really want to know how i figured out that detonating cord explosives can be used to tenderize meat.

dr Wolf once told me, "on the planes of hesitation bleach the bones of countless millions, who at the dawn of victory sat down to wait, and while waiting died." but i didnt catch who he said said it.

i love how you breathe smoke, and you hold in your sneezes. and you love everybody.

youd have to be crazy to think that world peace was a respectable goal. to think that decent wages for decency's sake could ever happen. youd have to be insane to make idealized dreams your ultimate goal in world change, right?the fish are always the last to notice the water.

9/20/2006

i just got the advice to "question the heroic", and i thought, ive already done that."only break one law at a time" - Ian K. Sullivan"hooliganism"scintillate"...of all the things to come true..." -Allisoni want to begin reading the greats; Riemann, Bohr, Gauss, Gottlob Frege...the formula is proven here!the concept that the number system was 'created' eludes me. beyond the fact that it is convention, and generated from our own minds, there is also the fact that it is what it is, independent of creation. it could be created no other way.remember that idea to build a parabolic mirror building to burn your neighbor/competitor? remember that idea!love obeys no conservation laws.Feynman's advice to wolfram was "fall madly in love"remember the idea for a forrest to cut itself down.

i suddenly want to become human. i want to receive mail and have a job and spend money and be normal.

i have all the negative effects of a methamphetamine users, without any of the benefits of doing meth... although ive never heard anyone say there was a benefit to doing meth.

embarrassed : me :: trees : the forest.

we are supposed to look for patterns on a broader scale. patterns of patterns. privilege escalation.maybe akathisia too? punding is the result of dopamine overactivity.

9/17/2006

oh, what a mess.insult: your mass to volume ratio is very high.unless of course they take that to mean that they are muscular, which makes it not an insult.i dont really like the idea of being a fan of anything.

"youre, alive! you curse, you sweat, you twitch, you have passion!"

i had some ideas tonight, with corey, about logic, and reality, and randomness. i am now having difficulty conceiving of something in reality that behaves illogically, and also something being truly random. although as usual, these ideas depend on the rigidity with which we define them. i am now thinking that as time has progressed, each successive physical theory has placed more and more strict bounds on the possiblity of randomness, and the possibility of illogical existence. ill have to remember this for the future.

"The use of a plutonium RTG battery resulted in minor demonstrations some days before launch by about 30 anti-nuclear protestors. The amount of radioactive plutonium in the RTG is 11 kg, about one-third the amount on-board the Cassini-Huygens probe when it launched in 1997. That launch was protested by over 300 people. The United States Department of Energy estimated the chances of a launch accident that would release radiation into the atmosphere at 1 in 350 and monitored the launch as it always does when RTGs are involved. It was believed that a worst-case scenario of total dispersal of on-board plutonium would spread the equivalent radiation of 80% the average annual dosage in North America from background radiation over an area with a radius of 65 miles (~110 km), with cleanup costing anywhere from $241 million - $1.2 billion USD per square mile."

the only thing i understand about this world is that i do not understand anything else about this world.

9/14/2006

when i was little i looked at the sun. i had been told by a variety of people not to look at it, but they were so adamant about it that i began to think they were lying. that there was no sun there at all. but i was wrong, and now im blind. i hope.i have been importing all my cds onto my computer, since i have the space to consoladate my music now, and i am approaching radiohead... and i suddenly have a strange fear, its a fear of falling into some sort of deep hole, from which it will take a long time to climb out of.a little deeper.i just got the advice to change the specific to the ambiguous.i dont think you have to hit "bottom" to be an addict, you just have to be willing to take the next step. and there will always be a next step.ive really enjoyed making silly analogies lately.me : liar :: you : cheati would tear my hair out, but its too short and greasy, i cant grab hold.you : dirt :: babies : nipplesi dont know the difference from right and wrong really, but i can tell im not right about anything ive done in a long time. and probably no one can really understand what i mean to say.me : you :: garbage-man : trash - this is also the dumbest insult i have thought of in a long time.i need you to swallow up the attention in the room.because i cant stand the crowd. but i love watching you glow.me : you :: existence : earthi hope i dont live to see the day that jay-walking becomes a national pasttime.analogies : me :: trauma : victimto the panicked and paranoid: never be at peace.

9/13/2006

i keep having an overwhelming feeling that our society oppresses us, and that since we are the maintainers of our society, that we are oppressing ourselves.

i found you in a lost and found.

there is a girl that always told me i would forget her. and boy was she wrong! in latin that would be nomen oblitum, for forgotten name. as opposed to nomen mudum which is naked name.

provably impossible for ordinary [computers] you.

multiplication : dimensions :: addition : ?

a certain romance

people say, "it makes you think" but nothing really makes anyone think. if you can find a way to force people to think, without wasting what they will think about, and without breaking any laws, then you could become a very wealthy person.

i think constrained, unconstrained yet forced, and unforced but personally chosen sleep deprivation have all benefitted me in the long run, oddly enough.

i just got the advice: use cliches. that might be a very good suggestion for me. i tend to abhor cliches to a detrimental point.

depressed over the confusing and inexplicable results of his experiments to determine whether light is a wave or a particle, thomas young performs one final double slit experiment, involving his wrists.

i cant help myself! well, okay, thats not true. i could help myself, but i am tired of that. actually, to be honest, most frowned upon behavior is due to "helping oneself".

Tau protein, which in its soluble form is essential for communication and transport within brain cells, had become insoluble in some cells, causing nerve cell damage and death in selected areas of the brain. Other nerve cells showed an accumulation of the amyloid precursor protein, which suggests that protein transport had been disrupted and the nerve cell functions affected.

9/11/2006

once i have done something in principle, i tend to lose desire to do it in practice. i have no explanation of this, i simply have observed it repeatedly and in a variety of situations. you may call it empirical evidence.

could we divide the subject of philosophy into two categories: the study of formal logic and reason, and the study of the implications of logic and reason(?). i ask because the former is somewhat metamathematics, philosophers such as Russell and Frege seem to have dealt with it extensively, as where the latter is more impact on everyday life, it more seeks to answer questions of what and why, relative to the human position in reality. such speculation is very distinct from the philosophy of reason, i think.from this perspective, it is the former concept which interests me, however it is the latter concept which allows me to distinguish between the two.

discussing these issues with Corey last night indicated to me that the argument is not fully developed. there is some fundamental difference between the probing of empirical science and the philosophy of everyday life.

asymmetry is interesting - it is the clue of where to look.

im not sure if ive mentioned the idea of a mathematical "map" to look at what is and isnt understood in mathematics, but last night there were some neat ideas between Corey and i: the concept of connectedness would be a huge benefit to studying these mathematical maps, with land and water and permanent dark spots!

although i still have no idea how one would go about constructing such a map, i have determined how to construct oddly simple versions, for instance, if we start with the axiom that logic is inconsistent, the map is entirely dark, except the axiom, since without logic we lack any tools to explore propositions within the landscape.

ill set them up, you knock them over.

if we start with the axiom that all statements are true, well, i guess that is kind of an odd idea, because it leads to logical contradictions very quickly.

if im not part of the solution, i figure i should be as big a part of the problem as possible.we are all a little obsessive compulsive.

we also realized, if you took several of these maps, each with certain axioms flipped one way or another, and you compiled them into a book of maps, you would have a peculiar view of a mathematical atlas.

unrealized consanguinity

we need to seperate the idea of 'truth' from the idea of 'axiom'.

youd have logical islands and everything.in science, these maps are begun with emperical evidence.

this might be one of the most intelligent things ive said in a long time: "so if you solve the Dirac equation for the 1s electrons on a mercury atom you discover that their relativistic mass is significantly greater than their rest mass, and that when this new mass is entered in the Bohr radius calculation, the 1s shell decreases in size significantly, which ultimately leads to the liquid nature of mercury in common temperatures"im not fully able to explain it yet, for instance, i dont know why the bohr radius calculation is dependent on the mass of the electron, but thats okay. in time.

so the problem seems to be an inability for me to express myself to people. which is peculiar, because i tend to think i am reasonably good at explaining abstract concepts to people in general. but when it comes to myself, my feelings and thoughts, i tend to disguise them or just not express them to people. i dont know if its a protection issue or a legitimate disability.

"In the TV series Bewitched, Aunt Clara had a very impressive collection of doorknobs. She referred to an unusual glass doorknob in her collection as the doorknob equivalent of the Hope Diamond."

keith and i have been trying to measure the speed of light at work, but its not quite working, and i have run out of trouble shooting ideas, mostly.

i think of this journal as some sort of creative pressure valve.hugs and kisses.

9/10/2006

i can achieve such an air of neurosis as to cause others around me to second guess themselves.

ive been dealing with the infinite (or not really dealing with it, but seeking a way of dealing with it) while working with factoring numbers. i was at first looking for a way to describe how the average number of factors increases over time as the number increases. which somehow implies that there are f-curve type distributions for the set of all numbers with some factor equal to whatever number n. i didnt know, and still dont know, how to deal with that.

the riemann sphere i mentioned before, that was an excellent idea as to how to deal with this sort of problem.

"In English criminal law, intention is one of the types of mens rea (Latin for "guilty mind") that, when accompanied by an actus reus (Latin for "guilty act") constitutes a crime."

the possibilities are frighteningly numerous... at first i feel overwhelming terror, and i cannot imagine how we might go about solving this problem of how the very small scale works. then i remember that it is not that frightening, and that it is not that complex, and that we solve problems with many hours and many small increments.

consensual crime

as ive begun to learn some of the mathematical formalism to quantum physics, i have been repeatedly tempted to try explaining it in terms of physical analogies. but i am so aware of the historical difficulty of that, the notorious difficulty even, that i feel somewhat... self deceiving... with what sometimes feels to be progress in a physical description.

its like a bad dream where you cant get to where youre going.

i almost forgot, i went and saw doug stanhope last night, with matt, in worcester. i told him he is my last living hero. i want to try to get him to keene at some point. in some ways, i feel like he is my best hope for a revolution, whether personal or societal. its like he has a clear view through a lot of the nonsensical bullshit that seems to be mucking up the world. oddly enough, the only two other people i would have considered to be in that category are bill hicks and bertrand russell, which is an odd grouping.also, at the show, a naked guy had a hilarious line of logic. he showed that not rape is murder, and even further, that if ladies are to avoid being murders, they should rape a burn victim today. wait, lemme look up his name... ah ha, andy o'fish. awesome. yeah, he would make an excellent logician. only not really, but itd be funny.

Bertrand Russell said: the whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.

but what if the 'wiser' people only appear wiser because they hesitate to risk being wrong? and what if the 'fools' only appear to be fools because they are willing to be wrong? am i wise for considering this? or foolish for saying it? i am of course, just having fun.

9/09/2006

excellent idea tonight: draw out a map of known physics concepts, and look for the blank spots.

will not is just more words for cannotthe concepts of competition and society tend to conflict with one another, in practice.heres to your disadvantage.

so what i was thinking was that mathematics is like some sort of map, where axioms are the starting points. and as we build both true and false statements, or propositions, based on the assumed axioms, we start to fill in the map, with say land or water. and the more developed we become with our mathematics, the more of the map we have. but Gödel showed that our maps would always have spots that would remain dark, and that we would always have to create new axioms to fill in the dark spots (or so they tell me, i dont really know). the blank spots are the important parts.

oh good, its foggy; i can sleep now.

at first i was thinking i should try to create such a map of mathemtics. perhaps it is my limited imagination, but i kept having difficulty getting past the concepts of dimension and layout. so i never got anywhere with it. but then the other day i considered doing the same thing with physics. and what i was thinking was this, power is the time rate of change of work, force is the time rate of change of momentum. momentum is kind of the time rate of change of intertia, (or more so, intertia is an object's resistance to a change in motion, as where the the derivative of position times an objects mass would equal momentum...). but it suddenly seemed easier than a mathematical map.

damn, i had an idea a little while ago about something i wanted to look up online, but now i dont remember what it is.it was some sort of math concept.

i learned about the riemann sphere yesterday and today, and damn, that was a good idea.

ah, i think what i wanted to learn more about was the first Hilbert problem, which apparently had to do with whether or not there was a set of numbers larger than the countables, but smaller than the uncountables. according to a book ive been reading for several years, it was somehow proven that there was and there wasnt, that you could have it however youd like. the idea of metamathematics is beginning to intrigue me more every moment. and so is the concept of infinity. i guess its time to find more friends(?).

it is true; i am a liar.

i should also mention, today at work, we tried to measure the speed of light, but we failed. maybe sunday.

9/07/2006

i was talking with a friend, about the relationship between language and 'ideas', how it appeared to me that language enables us to have many ideas which we could not otherwise develop. i guess what i am trying to think of is the relationship between the development of language, as far as its organization and articulation go, and the relationship to new ideas, and the communication of ideas. what are the rates of return? as an economist might say. so at 251 yesterday morning, an example comes to mind. computers, ultimately are a language of problem solving for which we could not have possibly imagined the power of until turing machines were thought up... mathematics is full of examples really, the whole of mathematics is this process of reiterative refinement in organizing and communicating and reorganizing ideas. although that isnt real clear, as to what it is saying, or how correct it is.

i told a homeless man i would help him, but he left before i returned.

the... complexity of an elementary proof, such as irrationality of sq(2), when entered into a computer proof-checking system, seems to suggest that there is a lot more information, and processing perhaps, occurring when we construct and verify and deal with proofs.

i should have brought him here. i should have said, "can i trust you?" and "and even more important, if i couldnt trust you, and i asked if i could, would you answer that i could?"its foolproof failsafe. it is no such thing.

i am beginning to suspect that the concept of evil is a big problem in the world. over the last several years i have begun to struggle when trying to imagine that someone is evil, or has some evil motive. i just dont see it. i can imagine they have different morals than me, or a different concious. that they have a different point of view or different ideals. that they may be delusional, or psychotic, but never do i imagine evil. im not even sure what evil means anymore.

9/05/2006

i feel like i have a vast yet valueless cache of bits and pieces to post here. and i suppose here and there ive got a paragraph that might provoke a useful thought in someone.

whats inside youre mind?

i was thinking the other day that, in science, we deal with the when where and how, not the why or what so much. in terms of when where and how, we are very successful. even in quantum mechanics, where we principally cannot know both when and where things will occur we can still describe much of the how, and assign probabilities to the when and where, as well as restrictions as to how much is and is not knowable.now, a lot of people have difficulty with all this. a lot of people seek the what and why of reality, which science cannot do much for. we can always say what and why something is in terms of other things, but that usually leads most people with those questions to ask for the what and why to deeper levels of reality, which sooner or later result in an unknown, or more likely, unknowable answer.it is interesting in fact, the very nature of the words 'what' and 'why' lead to a hierarchy of questioning, as opposed to the questions when where and how, which we tend to think of as having more definite answers.i think i kind of stole this all from something bertrand russell supposedly said about electricity:"Electricity, Bertrand Russell says, is not a thing, like St. Paul's Cathedral; it is a way in which things behave. When we have told how things behave when they are electrified, and under what circumstances they are electrified, we have told all there is to tell."

what an odd dilemma; on one hand i resist change, and grow comfortable in monotony. on the other hand i often grow terribly bored with the stale state of repetition.

i keep having some strange ideas during physical chemistry. a few classes ago i began to think about how first we quantized matter, with the atom hypothesis, then we quantized electricty, in theory. then we quantized energy with planck's explanation of blackbody radiation, and then light with einstein's photoelectric effect paper. so i was thinking the main concepts left are time and space (i am aware that there are theories of quantum gravity out there, or more that people are trying to construct them, and that at various times people have suggested quantization of space, and all sorts of bizzare stuff, non of which i am doing. im simply keeping my mind moving). which made me realize, if either one were quantized, so would the other, which is kind of neat. then i realized that the space is quantized for electrons bound to atoms, it seems, and that the whole concept of quantum leaps implies that the quantization of their possible position in space leads to a quantization of time in way. although now that doesnt seem to make as much sense. but thats okay, it has entertained me quite a bit. i feel like there was more of a point to this originally.

today i buried you in a pile of papers.we all find our own ways to cope.

About Me

I enjoy untying knots. I have a deep and unfounded appreciation for all humankind.
What you see is what you get. Except for politicians. And relationships. And book covers. And land mines. And plot twists. And sink holes. And the media. And fashion. And of course ice bergs too.
I find more things than I should profound. I fall in love with every noun, but it is okay because it is not contagious. I am both deeply superficial and superficially deep.